The modern history of this
Right-Wing Machine dates back at least to the first years of Richard Nixon's presidency.

Beset by growing public outrage over the Vietnam War, Nixon
determined that Republicans needed a more compliant media to promote their points of view
-- and to make his hardball political strategies work.

On Sept. 12, 1970, while at Camp David, Nixon arose late one morning
and began barking orders. He "has several plots he wants hatched," wrote his
chief of staff H.R. Haldeman in The Haldeman Diaries.

"One to infiltrate the John Gardner 'Common Cause' deal and
needle them and try to push them to left. Next, a front group that sounds like SDS
to support the Democratic candidates and praise their liberal records, etc., publicize
their 'bad' quotes in guise of praise."

Then, Nixon turned to his pet plan. Nixon was "pushing again on
[his] project of building OUR establishment in [the] press, business, education,
etc.," Haldeman wrote.

In the months that followed, Nixon kept pushing for an
infrastructure that would help him destroy his political enemies.

His anger reached a boiling point when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the
secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War. The president demanded counter-leaks in
friendly publications to discredit Ellsberg and others involved.

"We're up against an enemy, a conspiracy," Nixon said in a
tape-recorded White House conversation on July 1, 1971.

"They're using any means. We are going to use any means. Is
that clear? Now, how do you fight this [Ellsberg case]? You can't fight this with
gentlemanly gloves. We'll kill these sons of bitches." [See Stanley I.
Kutlers Abuse of Power.]

But Nixon found the press corps harder to manipulate than it was
during the early years of the Cold War. He lectured his staff on the need to bully
journalists into line. Nixon believed "the press and TV don't change their attitude
and approach unless you hurt them," Haldeman recounted on April 21, 1972. "The
only way we can fight the whole press problem, [Nixon] feels, is through the [Charles]
Colson operation, the nutcutters, forcing our news and in a brutal vicious attack on the
opposition."

Two months later, Nixon's pugnacious politics would come a cropper
in the Watergate scandal. As the scope of Nixon's criminality slowly emerged, The
Washington Post and other major news outlets led the way in exposing the evidence and
ultimately forcing Nixon's resignation on Aug. 9, 1974.

The disgraced president retreated to his estate in San Clemente,
Calif. But Nixon's followers blamed the "liberal" news media for hounding Nixon
from office and for "losing" the Vietnam War. They concluded that a more
conservative press was vital to their success.

Taking the lead in this endeavor was Nixon's treasury secretary,
William Simon, who was president of the John M. Olin Foundation. In the late 1970s, Simon
began pulling together executives of other conservative foundations with the goal of
building "OUR establishment."

In 1979, Simon argued in his book, A Time for Truth, that
only a strong conservative ideological movement could break the back of the dominant
Liberal Establishment. Simon accused this Liberal Establishment of enforcing misguided
concepts of "equality" and of being "possessed of delusions of moral
grandeur."

To build the Right's "counter-intelligentsia" and to
transform the Republican Party into a conservative weapon would require
"multi-millions" from business, Simon said. Simon's Olin Foundation allied
itself with other like-minded foundations to advance this cause, giving rise to the
nucleus of the Right's national infrastructure of think tanks, media and pressure groups.

In 1980, Simon published A Time for Action, which demanded
that the "death grip" of the Liberal Establishment and its "New
Despotism" be broken. Simon saw the news media as part of the enemy camp. He
especially targeted journalists who, Simon charged, "have been working overtime to
deny liberty to others."

Through his writing and his actions, Simon emerged as the principal
architect of the Right-Wing Machine's financial structure, while others provided more of
its intellectual framework. As then-journalist Sidney Blumenthal wrote, "by
controlling the wellsprings of funding, Simon makes the movement green." [See The
Rise of the Counter-Establishment, published in 1986. Blumenthal is now a special
assistant in the White House.]